"A Meeting in Valladolid"
According to an "Author's Note," this story first appeared in Spanish. "A Meeting in Valladolid" is about an English theatre company that travels to Spain to celebrate the new Anglo-Spanish peace--among the visitors is William Shakespeare. The playwright is disgusted by Spanish cruelty towards animals; the Spaniards are in turn sickened by the violence in the abridged version of Titus Andronicus which the Englishmen perform.
Shakespeare meets Cervantes and has explained to him that new literary form, the novel. Cervantes denounces the English for abandoning the Catholic Church and for their failure to contribute to the European war effort against imperialistic Islam. (As my well-educated readers know, Cervantes sacrificed much of his own life and health to this struggle.) Cervantes says the English will produce no great literature because life in England is too easy. I guess we readers are to get the idea that Shakespeare was going to abandon the theatre and become a farmer but a rivalry with Cervantes's words sparked a sense of rivalry that spurred him to continue his literary career and produce his greatest work.
More Shakespeare. Hamlet is not named, but he is one of the characters in this story, which is set in Wittenberg, where Hamlet is a student. In the middle of a lecture on the nature of beauty, which lecture has a focus on the nature of female beauty, Hamlet is called away because his father has died. Over the course of the rest of the story we learn that the lecturer discoursing on beauty, and his assistant, are wizards who have sold their souls to the devil. They exercise various esoteric powers, striking dead a Rector who thinks to (as we say nowadays) cancel them over their erotic lectures, for example. In a private session for two favored students, the sorcerers conjure up the shade of Helen of Troy in the interest of presenting an example of maximum beauty. Burgess finishes his tale in classic shaggy dog fashion--the ten-page story's last line is the remark of one of the students: "I don't think she was all that beautiful."
I'm no Shakespeare expert, and I'm not fluent in any language, so lots of references in "A Meeting in Valladolid" (in which people sling lots of Spanish and Arabic) and "The Most Beautified" undoubtedly went over my head. Facing this fifty-page story I am in even deeper and more treacherous waters--"The Cavalier of the Rose," a note tells us, is "based on the opera libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal;" the opera in question is Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, apiece of work I have never even heard of. If you have three hours to spare you can watch Der Rosenkavalier on youtube, and I considered doing this, but lacked the drive to listen to 180 minutes of (to me) incomprehensible German. This leaves me singularly unequipped to judge if Burgess here is offering us a faithful adaptation of the libretto, or a parody, or an update for modern audiences, or whatever.
Vienna in the first half of the 18th-century. While her husband is away, a beautiful thirty-something princess is having an affair with an 18-year old soldier, a count. The count is very pretty, thin and with smooth skin and so on. When the princess's cousin, a big fat slob of a baron, bursts into the bedchamber, the count pretends to be a chambermaid, and the Baron flirts with him and tries to arrange an assignation with him, even though he is betrothed to some rich bourgeois teenager.
The count is given the job of presenting to the fifteen-year-old merchant's daughter an engagement gift--the silver rose of the title. When the two beautiful teens meet they naturally fall in love. The count then plots a series of events involving disguises that put an end to the fat Baron's marriage to the fifteen-year-old so he can marry her himself.
This is a traditional story with traditional gags--cuckolding, cross dressing, mistaken identities, fat jokes, the distinct vices of the middle class and the nobility, and so on. Burgess and/or von Hofmannsthal fully recognize this; in the middle of the story the princess talks about the cliched and banal observations one hears when at the theatre, how they are repeated because they convey truths, and even admits to the count that their love affair is banal. In the end of the story the omniscient third-person narrator remarks on the simple unrealistic charms of the narrative he has just related, saying it is suitable for comic opera and darkly hinting that in real life the count would probably be maimed in a war, his wife die in childbirth, and the cowardly obese Baron live to a ripe old age.
(I guess I'll note that Burgess contrives to include a bunch of Shakespeare references in this story as well.)
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Burgess is a genius with a vast wealth of knowledge and tremendous skill with a host of languages, and I can't find any faults with these stories, but they aren't actually thrilling or moving or funny; they are like clever exercises from a virtuoso that lack surprise and passion. I feel like Burgess is holding them at arm's length, that there is too much distance between the reader and the characters for the reader to actually care what happens to anybody, to get emotionally involved. Maybe if I was an opera fan or a Shakespeare obsessive I would get more out of them; I have to report that I can tell the stories are good, but that I am not the best possible audience for them, and enjoyed them less than most of the novels of Burgess's I have read.
Like you, I'm a fan of Anthony Burgess. But my favorite Burgess works come from the Sixties and early 1970s. His later work like THE DEVIL'S MODE lack energy.
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